# Twelve Labs

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/twelve-labs  
**Vertical:** Artificial Intelligence  
**Subcategory:** Video Understanding AI (Search & Analysis)  
**Tier:** Emerging  
**Website:** twelvelabs.io  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

Raised $30M Dec 2024 with NVIDIA, Intel, Samsung Next as strategic investors. $57M total raised. Leading video intelligence API for semantic search, summarization, and AI actions on video content.

## Company Overview

Twelve Labs is a video understanding AI company building the intelligence layer for video content — enabling platforms to semantically search, summarize, and act on video assets using natural language rather than metadata tags. The company raised $30 million in December 2024 with NVIDIA, Intel Capital, and Samsung Next as strategic investors, bringing total funding to $57 million. Twelve Labs serves broadcasters, streaming platforms, sports media companies, and enterprise video archives.

The core technical challenge Twelve Labs solves is that video is fundamentally unsearchable by existing methods: you can search text documents by keyword, but a video of a soccer match cannot be searched for "the moment when the goalkeeper made a save" without Twelve Labs' multimodal understanding that processes visual frames, audio, and transcripts simultaneously to understand what happens in each scene.

The strategic investor composition reveals the market segments: NVIDIA's investment reflects GPU inference at scale for video processing; Intel Capital signals enterprise software distribution; Samsung Next positions Twelve Labs for integration into Samsung's device ecosystem for on-device video analysis. As video content volumes explode across enterprise (surveillance, training footage, product demos) and media (sports, news, entertainment), Twelve Labs' API becomes infrastructure for any application that needs to understand what's happening in video content.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What does Twelve Labs do?
Video understanding AI API — semantic search, summarization, and intelligent actions on video content using natural language. Enables platforms to find 'the moment when X happened' in any video.

### How much has Twelve Labs raised?
$57M total including $30M in December 2024 with NVIDIA, Intel Capital, and Samsung Next as strategic investors.

### Why is video understanding hard?
Video can't be keyword-searched like text. Twelve Labs processes visual frames, audio, and transcripts simultaneously to understand what actually happens in each scene.

### What markets does Twelve Labs serve?
Broadcasters, streaming platforms, sports media, enterprise video archives — any application where users need to find specific moments or understand content in large video libraries.

### What APIs does Twelve Labs offer?
Twelve Labs provides a Video Understanding API with three core capabilities: Search (semantic search across video libraries — 'find all moments where a speaker mentions pricing'), Generate (producing text summaries, chapters, and highlights from video), and Embed (creating video embeddings for downstream ML tasks). The API is model-agnostic — Twelve Labs trains and hosts specialized video-native models, while customers integrate the API into their applications without managing AI infrastructure.

### What industries use Twelve Labs?
Media and entertainment companies use Twelve Labs for content discovery (finding clip moments for licensing or social media), broadcasters for automated highlight generation and tagging, sports organizations for plays and athlete performance analysis, enterprise learning platforms for lecture search and knowledge extraction, and security/surveillance for event detection in large video archives. Any industry with large video libraries and search or analysis needs is a potential customer.

### How does Twelve Labs' video-native approach differ from OCR or audio transcription?
Most video AI systems extract text via OCR (reading on-screen text) and transcription (converting speech to text), then run NLP on those extracted strings. Twelve Labs' models ingest raw video — understanding visual semantics, motion, composition, and temporal relationships simultaneously. This enables finding moments based on what's happening visually ('a player celebrating after scoring'), not just what's being said — a capability that transcription-based systems fundamentally cannot provide.

### What is Twelve Labs' pricing model?
Twelve Labs prices on API usage — video hours indexed (for searchable libraries), API calls (for search queries and generation), and storage. There's a free tier for development, with usage-based pricing that scales to enterprise volume. Enterprise contracts include dedicated infrastructure, higher rate limits, custom model fine-tuning on customer video datasets, and SLA guarantees. The pricing is competitive with building equivalent capabilities internally, which would require specialized ML research teams.

## Tags

ai-powered, b2b, saas

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*